Klein opens her book with a quote from Rebecca Tarbottom, who was ExecutiveDirector of the Rainforest Action Network (she died accidentally not long before this book was completed), the punchline of which is "What we're really talking about, if we're really honest with ourselves, is transforming everything about the way we live on this planet." The rest of the book argues the case.
Klein does not believe that we can overcome the problem of global heating without a radical reorganization of our attitude to the world, and of the way we live in it. This, she argues, means socialism and the overthrow of the capitalist system. Capitalism is, by its very nature, antagonistic to the living world; even when it dons a green mantle, it cannot help but undermine Life itself. Capitalists themselves know this, which is why they are developing ways of escaping the mess that they will inevitably create, while leaving the rest of us to deal with the consequences. Macron's 'premiers de cordée' (lead climbers) are using their ropes to get the hell out of here, to a sheltered and heavily guarded mountain eyrie - or Mars, if necessary - while cutting off the 'loosers' who they think of as so much excess baggage.
If this is so - and I was already convinced of this before reading Klein's book - then what is to be done? For some, it is already too late (see, e.g. eand.co/how-capitalism-torched-the-planet-and-left-it-a-smoking-fascist-greenhouse-fe687e99f070) but Klein sees a sliver of hope. This is situated in the confrontation regions that she refers to as Blockadia, the places where the 'New Climate Warriors' confront the coal miners, the frackers, and the forest killers on the front line. The kernel of these groups is made up of First Peoples, those who have been pushed back, or inhabit the frontiers, and are the last guardians of a natural way of life. It's not that they are Noble Savages, but that their ways of life offer them alternatives - however slender - capitalism, and those ways of life, as capitalism expands into the last redoubts, are increasingly threatened.
For the most part, this is the work of a very good journalist. But it is also a kind of diary of an awakening consciousness, of how the 'anti-globalist' writer of 'The Shock Doctrine' came to center her work and her world-vision on climate change. At first, this seems to be yet another story of how having a child changes the way you see the world - a banal, facile bit of handwaving that is rarely particularly convincing. But in her last chapter, she gives an account of the difficulties she had in conceiving a child, and how she came to recognize that she was not alone in this: not only as a woman, but as a living creature. She covered the Deepwater Horizon disaster, shipping out into the oil covered waters, breathing the toxic fumes. At the time she was pregnant, and later had a miscarriage. Although she later learned that this was due to other causes, at first she thought that her unborn baby was another victim of the oil. Then she began to gather tales of women living near contaminated sites, discovering that there were high rates of foetal disturbance, and numerous hysterectomies among relatively young women. She also noted that the big losses among certain animal species affected by such disasters didn't show up immediately, but came online a few years later: it was the young and the unborn who died. Carbon based capitalism is eating the world's children.
Some years later, where are we? Klein seems to still be optimistic (I follow her on Twitter), but the political winds seem to be blowing in the wrong direction. Australia has just given a majority to a coal-loving government. India has handed governance to a fascist for a second five-year term. The US government hides away the facts about global warning. In Europe, fascism is on the rise, and although green parties did well in the recent elections, they are for the most part an uninspiring crew, wedded to some form or other of neoliberalism, and ready to unleash the dogs of war (I recall having an epic argument with some greens at the beginning of the invasion of Afghanistan; they were all for it). Warfare is a huge producer of warming pollution. In France and elsewhere, green activists of the kind that Klein prefers are pursued as if they were terrorists. I have trouble sleeping at night.
(This review was made possible by György Ligeti, Aija Puurtinen, Smokey Robinson, Our Native Daughters and Raul Midon)
